


our backs to the sun

by meggiefolchart



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, POV Bellamy, Post-Season/Series 02 AU, definitely heavy on the angst, not a lot of dialogue but plenty of communication!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-18 06:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18243947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meggiefolchart/pseuds/meggiefolchart
Summary: death lives in their memories and in their blood and in their bones.together, they learn to live with the red.(or, bellamy convinces clarke to stay after mount weather.)





	our backs to the sun

Bellamy’s bones feel like they have been turned into matchsticks.

Every step he takes away from Mount Weather feels like a step away from himself, away from the man that he had dreamed about becoming one day. He thinks about Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a hill from time until eternity and it feels like every step is the same, pushing himself over a mountain and over again.

He crumbles every time.

He and Clarke walk at the opposite ends of the pack, Monty a few steps behind him with his arms wrapped around himself through the entire journey. Every bone in Bellamy’s body wants to go to him, wants to wrap his arm around the other boys shoulder and say _we did the right thing_. But he can’t, and he doesn’t, and Monty continues to walk hunched in on himself, like he wants to curl into his own rib cage and hide from the weight of what the three of them have done. It’s a feeling Bellamy understands well. When they finally reach the gates to Camp Jaha, he leans against the post and watches as his people file in, searching and searching among the faces for the one he wants to see; for the one he knows it will hurt the most to look at, but needs to all the same. He watches Abby being brought through the gates on her stretcher, Kane walking along beside her; he’s glad when he sees Jackson rush to her first, call out to her and crouch beside where the soldiers lay her on the ground.

Clarke will need her after this, he thinks.

He wants to smile when Wick carries Raven through the gate, wants to show her some version of kindness, but all he can manage is to hold her gaze for a moment before he feels that need to curl in on himself he’d seen in Monty and he has to look away. He pretends the sharpness behind his eyes is from the sun.

He stays quiet, on the periphery, sees Jasper and wants to rip his own heart out.

It hurts, too much, more than he can handle on his own, and he’s looking for her desperately now. _Together_ , they had said, hands interlocked as they put pressure on the lever.

And then suddenly, she’s there.

She’s the last one, with her arms wrapped around Monty in the way that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do, clung tight to the boy as if to say _you’ll always have me_ , he thinks. They do not smile when they pull apart, nor does Monty smile at Bellamy when he sees him, just pulls tight on the sweater and hunches over again.

There is no joy here.

Not anymore.

Maybe one day, when they have all learned what it is to bear this weight, when it’s grown so familiar that they barely feel the burden anymore, not when it lives only among other dreams of blood and dirt and chains tying him to both.

Bellamy tries to let his eyes stay on Monty, to let his eyes follow the other boy as he walks through the front gate, but he just can’t. His gaze snaps to Clarke, and he can’t help the way the pain there destroys him. _Together_ , he remembers, and steps unflinchingly to stand beside her.

Like Helen and her thousands ships, they have torn down an army and they have torn down innocents, blood spilt at their fingertips because of stolen life. Alone they are terrible, and together they ravage worlds for the sake of love, for the sake of _life._  Alone they are ruined; together they are Rome at the dawn of her life.

“I think we deserve a drink,” he says, taking the final step to stand beside her. He keeps looking at her, letting his eyes flick away towards the horizon, trying to mirror her, but he needs to get her to look at him—she won’t. Her own eyes are hard on the survivors, _their_ survivors.

He wants her to look at him, but she can’t, and she doesn’t, and Bellamy understands.

“Have one for me,” she replies, and Bellamy doesn’t quite know what to say, doesn’t know what she means, only knows that he can’t not reply, not to her.  

 _Together_ , she'd said.

It’s what he’d been thinking about since stepping foot outside Mouth Weather, the singular thought he’d had as they took every step further and further away. _Together_ , they had said, pulling the lever as one. _Together_ , he had thought, staring at the dirt as he remembered the weight of a metal collar around his neck. _Together_ , he had remembered, half-conscious from exhaustion and the weight of so much blood.

There’s none on his hands anymore, but it still stains.

“Hey,” he says, voice unfamiliar. “We can get through this.”

He says we without thinking, but as soon as the small word leaves his mouth it feels right. _Together._ His heart isn’t in his chest anymore, is right there at the base of his throat threatening to choke him. He shifts his weight between his feet, feels tension rolling down his spine in waves— _together_ , she promised, but the beat of silence speaks volumes.

“I’m not going in.”

And it stops beating.

 _Together_.

Why does she feel miles away?

A thousand things run through his mind; anger first, because it feels like it’s been all he’s known these last years. Anger with his mother for both stealing his life and giving him purpose; with Jaha for floating her when her only crime was creating life; with Octavia for being born; with himself for having that thought and with himself for failing them all. He’s pounded his fists into walls and into flesh, had skin crack under his strength and had the same done unto him. He’s lived with this anger longer than he’s lived without it, and when Clarke says those words, when she threatens to break the promise that has kept him walking, kept him _whole_ and unshattered since they left that mountain, it is anger that he feels first.

Anger never healed him though.

Forgiveness did.

“Clarke, if you need forgiveness—” he stars, looking at the ground as the anger fades out of him. _I’m a monster_ , he remembers. “I’ll give that to you. You’re forgiven.”

The look in her eyes tells him she doesn’t believe him.

When she looks away, the want turns to pain, a new one that settles in his chest alongside the pain of what he has done, nestled right next to the jagged-edged pride that he’s not ready to feel yet, that he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be ready to. He steps to the side, trying to keep himself in her line of sight, unafraid of showing her how much he needs her to look at him.

“Please, come inside,” he goes on, brown eyes refusing to leave her face.

“Take care of them for me.”

“Clarke,” he says, voice bordering on desperate, an emotion lodged in his throat that he’s been terrified of until this very moment—terrified to show her, terrified to even feel. He’s shifting back and forth between his feet again, a nervous wreck, unable to channel his feelings into anything other than movement.

She speaks again before he can go on.

“Seeing their faces everyday? It’s just gonna remind me of what I did to get them here.”

“What _we_ did,” he interrupts immediately, the pain in his voice mirroring the pain he can see plainly in her blue eyes. There are tears there, and when he leans in closer he can see them shimmering. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

She looks away from him again, and he knows what she will see there beyond the gate, the faces of everyone that they love, the faces of everyone that survived because the pair of them was willing to slaughter hundreds. He knows that she will see her mother there, laid out on a stretcher with Jackson tending to her, Kane leaning over the pair of them with worry in his eyes. He knows that she will see Monty, likely by himself, needing his best friend but unable to go to him, Maya’s radiation ruined face hot behind his eyes. He knows that she’ll see the faces of people who strung him up with chains, and that the same jagged-edged pride will be lodged in her heart as is lodged in his, a burning and ruinous thing that threatens to tear them both apart.

 _Together_ , they’d said.

“I bear it so they don’t have to,” she says, and Bellamy does the only thing he can.

He begs.

“Please,” he says, and knows that there are tears in his eyes to match hers. He can feel the sharpness behind his eyes again, the pain that he had blamed on the sun but can’t any longer. _Together_ , they said, and that will never change. He needs it not to. “Please, Clarke. Come inside.”

He steps towards her again, crosses a line that he’s sure neither of them remembers drawing in the dirt anymore. His hand rises of its own accord, and before he knows it, his thumb is stroking along the edge of her jawline and then his forehead is leaning against her own as her eyes flutter closed. He keeps his own open, looks down the bridge of his nose at the tops of her eyelashes.

“Please,” he says for the third time. “I need you.”

Neither of them breathes.

“ _We said together_ ,” he whispers.

A beat.

Both their hearts restart.

“Together then.”

For a half-moment, he thinks that she’s asking him to go with her, to leave these survivors behind the way that he had thought about asking her to do the day she first blessed him with forgiveness. He remembers the thought flickering through his head, wanting to go, wanting to  _run_ from all that pain and anger he had spent his life learning to bear. That night his heart had not been half as dark as his is now, but with Clarke’s hair glinting in the sun it doesn’t feel that way, and he thinks maybe this time he would go.

If she asked, maybe he would.

 _Together_ , they said.

Helen and her thousand ships.

He’s glad later when it doesn’t come to that.

When she pulls away, he feels the absence of her in his space like the loss of a limb, like she is a part of him now and will be forevermore. His hand falls away from her jaw and she steps back, and Bellamy both can and cannot breathe again. _I need you_ , he thinks to himself again, and she must be able to read him as well as he can read her, or maybe she feels the loss him the same way, because she extends her hand and clasps his in her own without any pomp or circumstance.

They make a home in each other time and time again.

They are separated the moment they step through the gates, and he can see the rush of agonizing panic he feels when he releases her hand mirrored in her eyes. Kane called for him though, and Jackson shouted her name across the clearing, and their jobs here are not the same.

They are two sides of a single coin.

“I’ll see you later?” she says, voice raising on the final word, a question that needs to be answered yes.

“I’ll see you later.”

His voice is sure, affirmative, and he gives her a small nod before she turns and walks away. He lets himself keep looking at her for a moment, watches as she goes to Jackson and crouches at his side and listens to everything he needs her to do. It’s when she stands again and sees him still watching and casts a sad smile his way that he knows even apart, even with this small distance, they are in this together.

He turns away after giving her a smile to match.

They miss each other all day.

Clarke sequesters herself away in medical, tends to every wound that she can get her hands on, and Bellamy instinctively knows exactly why. He knows that she needs every life that makes it back to survive, needs every single one of them to go on living a life that is worth all that death. Bellamy does the same, in his own way, appreciates taking orders for once instead of having to give them, lets Kane direct him where to go and what to do; he reinforces the parts of the perimeter that need it and helps others with organizing their few belongings they have where they’ll let him. A girl with a barrette in her hair smiles at him, and he wonders how innocence will fare now in a world like this.

He goes to dinner in the mess hall and searches the crowd again for a flash of blonde--can barely stomach the meal when she doesn’t show. He walks away from his food, barely touched.

He goes back to organizing weapons, cleans all the ones that he can find, and then recleans some of the ones he thinks he didn’t do a good enough job on.

His hands shake every time he grazes a trigger.

It’s late when he sees her again, far later than he thought it was. His eyelids are heavy, too heavy for the task at hand, but every time he lets his eyes fall closed for more than half a second, he relives every moment in the mountain at hyper speed. He can feel it where the mountain men put a needle in his neck, shoved poison in his veins and told him it was heaven sent. He can feel the bruising around his throat as chains weigh on it, salvation a world away as his skin gets rubbed raw by the metal. He can feel himself butchered over and over again, can feel the places where they stripped away pieces of him for their own gain, and suddenly he can’t breathe through the absence of them.

He doesn’t remember when the sun set or when day faded into an inky black night, but it feels like daylight on his face when she says his name.

“Bellamy?” she says, and when his eyes flick up from the workbench, he sees her. She’s standing there in the entryway with her arms crossed, all the dirt stripped clean from her face, wet curls loose down her back.

Sharpness and drowsiness mix behind his eyes, and suddenly she starts to blur before him.

He doesn’t realize that it’s because there are tears in his eyes, not until she’s standing right in front of him, not until the very tips of her fingers are touching his cheekbone and he has to will the water to just _fall_ so that he can see through them and into the blue of her eyes. Her hand flicks away the tears that slip down his cheek, but he feels the absence of her hand when it falls to her side more than he feels the dampness that remains. Neither of them talks, and neither of them moves; they just stand there, looking at each other, remembering together what they have done and who they have not saved. The devil lives in their hearts, but standing with her feels like that salvation he had dreamed out every moment he was in the mountain, feels like _hope_.

He doesn’t know how long they stand like that, just drinking each other in, but one moment he is staring at the little mole just atop her lip and the next her hand is wrapped in his again, grounding him back to Earth.

“C’mon,” she says, pulling him towards the door.

As always, she leads.

As always, he follows.

He would, he thinks, follow her to the very end of the earth.

She leads them through the metal hallways of the old space station until they are standing before the door to his bedroom, Clarke pushing it open with her free hand. They still don’t speak when they both step inside, don’t speak when she pushes lightly at Bellamy’s chest until he sits on the edge of his bed. They don’t speak when she leans down to untie the laces of his boots slowly and methodically, don’t speak when she pulls both of them off and pushes him back again.

He almost falls asleep before his head even his the pillow.

Almost.

They don’t speak when she leans down again, presses her lips to his brow, softer than any display of affection he thinks he’s ever received.

He’s still awake when she pulls away—she’s always pulling away, even now. _I was being weak_ , he remembers, tears in her eyes, but gaze hard as she sent him into the very mountain that took his life from his bones and turned it into a science experiment. With his eyes half-lidded, he can see when she reaches the door, can see her turn back and look at him, expression unreadable. He can see her hesitate, like maybe she doesn’t want to go.

But he doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t ask to stay.

 _Together_ , they said, but it feels again like she is miles away.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there; he closes his eyes, but the image of Clarke standing in his doorway is still seared into his head, branded there alongside flashes of cages and chains. He closes his eyes, and he sees men in white radiation suits, feels hard water as it beats his skin red. When he opens his eyes, he sees darkness and gasps, remembers the underground prison he thought he might die in.

When he finally can’t take it any longer, he sits up in his bed, pushes up and away from the blankets he hadn’t even bothered to crawl under and goes to the door. 

The sight of Clarke slumped against the wall outside his room is an unexpected one.

She’s almost curled in on herself, her elbows resting on the tops of her bent knees as her head sits heavy in her palms. He’s too tired for the sight of her to shock him though, too tired to feel anything except the exhaustion crawling through his body, the bone-deep weariness he thinks she must feel too. She doesn’t make any explanation for why she made her home outside of his quarters, doesn’t do anything except pick her head up from her hands and look at him as steadily as he’s looking at her. There’s no dampness in her eyes anymore, but he can see the redness there, can see everything that he’s feeling mirrored in her eyes.

Maybe he blames her for sending him into the mountain.

She’s still his salvation.

He sighs, reaches his hand out to her, and still neither says anything when she reaches up and takes his hand, lets him help pull her to a stand. Her hair is a disheveled mess of curls, almost as messy as he thinks his own must look.

A mad-dark tangle of curls to match her own halo of blonde ones.

He steps backwards easily, pulls her along and back over the threshold into his bedroom. This time it’s he who leads her over to the bed, he who puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her down slightly until she’s perched on the edge. He sits down beside her, and they both level their gazes at each other.

There’s a million thoughts in his head.

Looking at her, they all quiet.

All but one.

 _Together_.

He doesn’t take her in carefully, doesn’t hesitate when his eyes want to wander. They trace the curve of her brow, the top line of her lip and the place where a mole sits just on top of it. His eyes get to her hair again, and this time his hands meet his gaze, and he lets himself take all of her hair into both of his palms. She twists, her knees shifting direction as she faces her back to him. Slowly, methodically, he runs his hands gently through her hair, still vaguely damp in places from the shower she took earlier, horribly matted in others. He pulls the knots out carefully, and then lets his hands revisit the familiar motion of braiding hair, end over end just like he used to do for Octavia what feels like lifetimes ago now. He does one single braid down the length of her hair, and lets it hang when he’s finished, but she doesn’t turn around right away so he lets his hands wander back up, puts both of them on her shoulders.

His thumbs brush against the nape of her neck, the tips of his fingers just grazing her collarbones as they accidentally dip under the collar of her new shirt. Her breathing doesn’t quicken, and neither does his. This, he thinks, is a moment of healing.

Before thinking about it too much, he slips his hands around until they meet in the middle, and then keeps going until he is hugging her, his face nestled into the crook of her neck from behind, nose grazing the edge of her jaw as she lifts her own hands and holds onto his forearms. They stay like that a moment, neither moving, but then it’s like something shatters in Clarke and there is only _pain_ —a healing pain; not a destruction this time, but a rebirth. She turns in his grasp until she is curled on his lap, her legs over his and her arms tight around his waist, head pressed against the place where she can hear his heart beating in his chest. Again, he isn’t sure how much time passes, only knows that he holds her until her sobs quiet and her tears dry again, and that when he leans back it’s to run both of his hands over the sides of her head until they cup either side of her jaw.

She looks small here in his hands.

It’s a wonder how she can hold the weight of this world.

It feels like second nature to lean in and press his lips against her forehead before pulling back again, looking down at her with sad eyes as both of them lean down and rest their heads on his pillow. At first, they’re separated again, not quite touching. He’s lying on his back, breathing even, but he can feel her on her side, knows that her body is turned towards him and all he would need to do to touch her again is stretch his arm out _just_ so. It’s Clarke that reaches out this time though, edges closer to him until her hand is over his heart and her head is leaning on his shoulder.

It’s not even a choice when he shifts to wrap his arm around her shoulders, not even a choice when he pulls her in and presses another kiss against her temple this time.

The breath she exhales is hard to read, somewhere halfway between a sound of relief and another sob.

He understands the feeling well.

He can feel when she starts to cry again, but it’s softer than earlier, and this time he lets himself cry, too, can feel dampness slip down his cheeks and holds her tighter when he feels her starting to tremble. She falls asleep first, and he can feel it against his chest when her breathing evens out, and it feels like she’s a part of him, like the calm that exudes from her in her sleep is seeping into his bloodstream. Neither of them sleep through the night, but he pushes loose strands of hair from her face when she wakes up with tears in her eyes and she shakes him awake an hour later when he’s having a nightmare of his own, calms him down by holding him tightly and resting her head against his chest again.

The head and the heart, side by side.

 _Together_.

**Author's Note:**

> title from silhouette by aquilo!


End file.
